The All Hands meeting in Panama City provided an excellent reason for several members of the PCP-PIRE to duck out of their offices and labs for a couple weeks of fieldwork in various parts of Panama. These included visits to Los Santos, Chiriquí and Colón provinces, in addition to continued collecting in the immediate Panama Canal area.

Prior to the meeting Austin Hendy and Roger Portell, as well as paleobotanist Steve Manchester, newly minted PCP-PIRE post-doc Aaron Wood and STRI interns Jorge Moreno and Carlos De Gracia hit the road to explore fossiliferous areas of Los Santos and Chiriqui provinces. Our first stop was to continue the search for "Oligocene" petrified woods around the town of Ocú, in central Los Santos Province, about five hours west of Panama City. The wood can be found in abundance alongside farms and in gardens and stonewalls, but actual outcrop so far had eluded us. On this trip, with the help of some local guides, we found many more beautiful specimens (often gathered together in plowed fields), as well as at least scrappy exposures of weathered host sediments and the underlying volcanic rocks. We located one new quarry in adjacent strata that yielded a significant collection of not only leaves and seeds, but also many marine invertebrates, indicating that the Ocú region was low-lying and near the coast about the time that the Ocú forests were growing. Biostratigraphic dating of microfossils collected at this quarry will provide critical insight into when the Ocú woods and those collected from the Tonosi Formation (further south) lived.

Our field trip proceeded south to the coastline of the Azuero Peninsula, where an extensive basin of the Eocene Tonosi Formation crops out in beach exposures, road cuts and farmers' fields. We devoted most of our efforts at Playa Bucarao, a spectacular succession of shallow marine sediments exposed in a wave-cut platform that is only accessible at low-tide. At this site we aimed to strengthen our collections of fossil seeds that Fabiany Herrera and Steve Manchester have been researching, expand our collection of well-preserved molluscs and search more methodically for vertebrate remains. This locality is yielding some of Panama's oldest vertebrates and on this trip surrendered a crocodile femur, turtle scutes, shark teeth, as well as other fish teeth and cranial elements. Austin continued measuring the section and collecting samples for microfossil biostratigraphy, while Roger focused on collecting specimens of Aturia, an ancestor of the modern Nautilus (cephalopod), that is abundant at this site. We also visited a farm near Cañas, where exposed limestone contained abundant echinoids, rare crabs, shark teeth, and wood fragments. Austin and Roger plan to describe the marine invertebrate fauna of the Tonosi Formation in the near future, in addition to discussing the nature and significance of Panama's Aturia fossil record.

Roger and Austin continued westward to the city of David, in Panama's Chiriqui Province, where the PCP-PIRE team has recently begun paleontological reconnaissance. The rocks exposed to the east and north of David are of the Galique Formation, which appears to be intermediate in age between the Culebra and Gatun formations we have been studying in the Panama Canal. Courtesy of AES Panama we were able to access outcrops at Presa Baragon, north of Gualaca, and make large collections of rich mollusc and crab assemblages. The Galique Formation appears to have a diverse Early-Middle Miocene fauna, which has never been described, and therefore is a critical new element to Panama's Neogene fossil record.

All in all, it was a very successful trip. We collected some of Panama's oldest vertebrates, came to understand much more about the stratigraphic and paleoenvironmental context of the Ocú woods, collected specimens and data that will support future publications on the Tonosi Formation and added significant material to our collections from what is essentially a stratigraphic gap in Panama's marine invertebrate fossil record.